Romney Camp Woos Women While Stumbling on Equal Pay

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Mitt Romney spent his first full
day as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee making a
direct appeal to women, part of an effort to repair the
political damage caused by a combative primary contest.

Surrounded by dozens of female business-owners yesterday at
a warehouse in Hartford, Connecticut, Romney worked to deflect
Democratic attacks that he isn’t sufficiently supportive of
women and close what a poll showed was an almost 20-point
deficit to President Barack Obama among female voters.

“I was disappointed in listening to the president as he’s
saying, ‘Oh, Republicans are waging a war on women,’” Romney
told his audience. “The real war on women is being waged by the
president’s failed economic policies.”

Yet even as Romney worked to show sensitivity to women’s
issues, a misstep by a top campaign aide and the candidate’s own
questionable assertion about job losses by women as the U.S.
struggled in recent years threatened to undermine his efforts.

The dust-ups underscored the challenge Romney faces as he
works to pivot to the general election. With rival Rick
Santorum’s April 10 exit from the Republican race virtually
assuring him his party’s nomination, Romney and his campaign are
focusing on courting swing voting blocs, starting with many
suburban women.

Abortion, Contraception

Romney and his Republican rivals, though, spent much of the
past year courting their party’s base by touting their
opposition to abortion rights, backing legislation to allow some
employers to deny health insurance coverage for contraception,
and vowing to stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a
women’s health organization that provides routine medical
examinations and cancer screenings along with abortion services.

Switching the political conversation won’t be easy for
Romney, as illustrated during a conference call his campaign
held yesterday with reporters before the Hartford event. Asked
whether Romney supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Lanhee
Chen, his policy director, said he would have to research the
matter before answering.

“We’ll get back to you on that,” he said, after a six-second pause.

The law, the first Obama signed as president in 2009, made
it easier for women to file equal-pay lawsuits.

Ledbetter Comment

Chen’s comment quickly became Democratic political fodder.
Within hours, the Obama campaign circulated a critical statement
from Ledbetter, the Alabama woman for whom the act was named.

“I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Mitt Romney
is not willing to stand up for women and their families,” she
said.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina sent an e-mail to
supporters detailing the “five things” to know about Romney.
Number one on the list: “Romney’s positions are the most
radically anti-women of any candidate in a generation.”

Romney aides sought to quell the flap, saying their
candidate had no intention of changing the law.

‘Never Worked’

A new debate was stirred last night when Democratic
strategist Hilary Rosen appeared to criticize the candidate’s
wife, saying in an interview on CNN that Ann Romney “has
actually never worked a day in her life.”

“She’s never dealt with the kinds of economic issues that
a majority of women in this country are facing,” said Rosen, a
Democratic National Committee adviser with close ties to the
White House.

Ann Romney responded to Rosen’s comments with her first
posting on Twitter: “I made a choice to stay home and raise
five boys. Believe me, it was hard work,” she wrote.

Her third son, Josh, defended that decision, saying on his
Twitter feed that his mother “is one of the smartest, hardest
working woman I know. Could have done anything with her life,
chose to raise me.”

Democrats, too, were critical. Within an hour of Rosen’s
remarks, Messina and Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod sent
Twitter messages calling the comments “inappropriate” and
“wrong.”

Romney’s Case

At his rally yesterday, Romney pressed his case that Obama
will do “anything he can to deflect from his record” on the
economy, and he charged that the administration’s failure to
effectively manage the economic recovery has had a
disproportionate impact on women.

Waving a glossy flier, he read from a campaign document
titled “Women and the Obama Economy” distributed by aides
before the event.

“This is an amazing statistic,” Romney said. “The
percentage of jobs lost by women in the president’s three, three
and a half years, 92.3 percent of all the jobs lost during the
Obama years have been lost by women. Ninety-two point three
percent!”

That statistic was later rated “mostly false” by
PolitiFact, a nonpartisan website that checks political claims.

Male-dominated industries such as construction and
manufacturing lost more jobs early in the U.S. economic downturn
-- when George W. Bush was president -- while women were more
heavily represented in the job losses that came in the later
months, when state and local governments laid off public-sector
workers such as teachers.

Romney is counting job losses from the start of the Obama
administration, a time frame that only counts the later part of
the recession. Overall, more men than women have lost jobs
during the entirety of the nation’s economic struggles, reported
the site.

‘Critical Facts’ Ignored

“There is a small amount of truth to the claim, but it
ignores critical facts that would give a different impression,”
according to PolitiFact.

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted last week,
Obama was ahead of Romney among female voters by 19 percentage
points. Among all the registered voters surveyed April 5-8,
Obama led Romney by seven points, 51 percent to 44 percent.

Obama won the overall popular vote 53 percent to 46 percent
over Republican John McCain, an Arizona senator, in the 2008
presidential race, benefiting from 13-point advantage among
female voters.

Factors complicating Romney’s bid to pitch himself to women
will include a federal budget pushed by the House Republican
leadership that he has endorsed.

Ryan Plan

The plan, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul
Ryan of Wisconsin, calls for reductions in food stamps, two-thirds of whose adult recipients are women; Pell grants, about
two-thirds of which go to female college students; Medicaid,
about 70 percent of whose beneficiaries are female, and child
care, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.

As he campaigned in Wisconsin prior to the state’s April 3
primary, Romney frequently appeared with Ryan, driving home the
link between the two.

Romney said yesterday that he has time to reintroduce
himself to a general election audience before November’s
election.

“The campaign started yesterday, the general election
campaign,” Romney said in an interview on Fox News. “We have
some time ahead, seven months in the general election
campaign.”